Friday, July 31, 2015

As I have noted before, there remains a debate about the supposed "heterodoxy" of Evagrius, about whom a steady stream of books has been published in the last fifteen years. I am of the view that such doubts and debates have now been concluded in favor of Evagrius thanks to the landmark work of Augustine Casiday, whom I interviewed here.

But those debates do not seem to be over, and a new book edited by an important Catholic patristic scholar, Robin Darling Young, together with Joel Kalvesmaki, will bring us further insights from them and other scholars, including Gregory Collins, Brian E. Daley, Luke Dysinger, Julia Konstantinovsky, Columba Stewart, and others: Evagrius and His Legacy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 376pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345-399) was a Greek-speaking monastic
thinker and Christian theologian whose works formed the basis for much
later reflection on monastic practice and thought in the Christian Near
East, in Byzantium, and in the Latin West. His innovative collections of
short chapters meant for meditation, scriptural commentaries in the
form of scholia, extended discourses, and letters were widely translated
and copied. Condemned posthumously by two ecumenical councils as a
heretic along with Origen and Didymus of Alexandria, he was revered
among Christians to the east of the Byzantine Empire, in Syria and
Armenia, while only some of his writings endured in the Latin and Greek
churches.

A student of the famed
bishop-theologians Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius
left the service of the urban church and settled in an Egyptian monastic
compound. His teachers were veteran monks schooled in the tradition of
Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Anthony, and he enriched their
legacy with the experience of the desert and with insight drawn from the
entire Greek philosophical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through
Iamblichus.

Evagrius and His Legacy brings
together essays by eminent scholars who explore selected aspects of
Evagrius’s life and times and address his far-flung and controversial
but long-lasting influence on Latin, Byzantine, and Syriac cultures in
antiquity and the Middle Ages. Touching on points relevant to theology,
philosophy, history, patristics, literary studies, and manuscript
studies, Evagrius and His Legacy is also intended to catalyze further study of Evagrius within as large a context as possible.

"The
scholarship on Evagrius Ponticus has seen a veritable explosion in the
last ten to fifteen years. Now recognized as a major fourth-century
intellectual figure, Evagrius and his role within contemporary networks
continue to be reassessed. Evagrius and His Legacy is a valuable
contribution to that effort; focused and excellently structured, this
splendid volume represents the state of the art of Evagrian scholarship
while leading the way toward further inquiry." —Susanna Elm, professor of history and classics, University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Freud, of course, called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious." But long before Freud, the capacity of dreams to reveal important messages was known by Jews and Christians as seen by the number of dreams of significance that show up in the Bible. Biblical dreams have been studied by scholars, but analysis of the uses of dreams and visions in post-biblical and especially patristic literature has tended to be piecemeal. But now we have a book-length study recently released:

Dreams and visions played important roles in the Christian cultures of
the early middle ages. But not only did tradition and authoritative
texts teach that some dreams were divine: some also pointed out that
this was not always the case. Exploring a broad range of narrative
sources and manuscripts, Jesse Keskiaho investigates how the teachings
of Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory the Great on dreams and visions
were read and used in different contexts. Keskiaho argues that the early
medieval processes of reception in a sense created patristic opinion
about dreams and visions, resulting in a set of authoritative ideas that
could be used both to defend and to question reports of individual
visionary experiences. This book is a major contribution to discussions
about the intellectual place of dreams and visions in the early middle
ages, and underlines the creative nature of early medieval engagement
with authoritative texts.

Monday, July 27, 2015

I remember once attending a very spikey (did only Canadian Anglicans use that odd term to describe the highest of high-church Anglo-Catholic liturgics?) Evensong and Benediction presided over by the local bishop who said of St. Barnabas in Ottawa and its lavish use of incense "At least here you know you are in a church thanks to the smell," a reference, I thought, to the often indistinguishable modern, purpose-built churches of cinder block that look like some hideous hybrid between an office block and a Soviet hydro station, lacking any distinguishing signs or smells of divine worship. (Speaking of which, as a would-be collector of incense, I found this website has fantastically fast service and a wonderfully wide collection of some really delightful and outstanding incense.)

The role of smell has fascinated me for a long time. In the 1990s I did extensive traveling (five of seven continents, as it turned out) and I remember being on an ecumenical trip thousands of miles from home and going for an evening stroll with some of my colleagues. Some smell or other in the wind instantly transported me back home and evoked still-sore memories of a girl I had then been dating until recently.

Why does the olfactory sense have such power? That question came up in a book whose hardback version has been out for nearly a decade, and was very favorably reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. Now the University of California Press tells me a more affordable paperback version is forthcoming this September of a fascinating book from the Orthodox scholar Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (U Cal Press, 2015), 448pp.

About this book we are told:

This book explores the role of bodily, sensory experience in early
Christianity (first – seventh centuries AD) by focusing on the
importance of smell in ancient Mediterranean culture. Following its
legalization in the fourth century Roman Empire, Christianity cultivated
a dramatically flourishing devotional piety, in which the bodily senses
were utilized as crucial instruments of human-divine interaction. Rich
olfactory practices developed as part of this shift, with lavish uses of
incense, holy oils, and other sacred scents. At the same time,
Christians showed profound interest in what smells could mean. How could
the experience of smell be construed in revelatory terms? What
specifically could it convey? How and what could be known through smell?
Scenting Salvation argues that ancient Christians used olfactory
experience for purposes of a distinctive religious epistemology:
formulating knowledge of the divine in order to yield, in turn, a
particular human identity.

Using a wide array of Pagan, Jewish,
and Christian sources, Susan Ashbrook Harvey examines the ancient
understanding of smell through religious rituals, liturgical practices,
mystagogical commentaries, literary imagery, homiletic conventions;
scientific, medical, and cosmological models; ascetic disciplines,
theological discourse, and eschatological expectations. In the process,
she argues for a richer appreciation of ancient notions of embodiment,
and of the roles the body might serve in religion.

Psychoanalytic thought is not entirely foreign to Eastern Christianity, though scholarly efforts to study and integrate it are not nearly as frequent or far advanced as for psychoanalysis and Western Christianity, not least in Jungian terms. I noted here a recent scholarly monograph, and gave some fuller thoughts here to the uses and abuses of Freud.

About this book by Pound the publisher tells us:

Marcus Pound's book develops a specifically theological form of
psychotherapy rooted in liturgy and arising from engagement with
postmodern psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacans claim that the unconscious is
structured like a language radically challenged psychoanalysis and
Pound uses this as the basis for his work in this volume. Postmodern
psychoanalysis has been anticipated by theology, and Pound goes further
in this claim to argue there has been a return to theology in
psychoanalysis.

I returned to Freud this year in writing my lecture for last month's OTSA conference at Fordham, where I took up the uses and abuses of "forgetting" in various forms as an integral part of how Christian tradition develops, not least in the history of Catholic-Orthodox estrangement and reconciliation. As I think we have all learned by now thanks to him and modern psychology, not all forms of forgetting are regrettable, and not all forms of remembering are commendable.

Even more than Ricoeur the work of a contemporary scholar is very suggestive and illuminating: Bradford Vivian of Syracuse University's Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Againis an interesting and suggestive work that argues about how, when it comes to such things as cultural conflicts and reconciliation, deliberate forgetting can be as beneficial ritualized remembrance. In witness of this, consider recent debates over what to do with the Confederate flag in the south. The move to have it removed from official public display suggests that culturally many people are understandably prepared to "forget" that history instead of seeking ad perpetuam rei memoriam.

The importance of forgetting remains an important and under-appreciated one for Catholics and Orthodox still struggling to come to terms with our dolorous and divisive past. We remember and repeat, Freud showed, in order to work through--or (as we say today), "move on." Let it be so, and soon.

In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study, Andrew Walker White
explores the origins of Byzantine ritual - the rites of the early Greek
Orthodox Church - and its unique relationship with traditional theatre.
Tracing the secularization of pagan theatre, the rise of rhetoric as an
alternative to acting, as well as the transmission of ancient methods of
musical composition into the Byzantine era, White demonstrates how
Christian ritual was in effect a post-theatrical performing art, created
by intellectuals who were fully aware of traditional theatre but who
endeavoured to avoid it. The book explores how Orthodox rites avoid the
aesthetic appreciation associated with secular art, and conducts an
in-depth study (and reconstruction) of the late Byzantine Service of the
Furnace. Often treated as a liturgical drama, White translates and
delineates the features of five extant versions, to show how and why it
generated widely diverse audience reactions in both medieval times and
our own.

It's not for the faint of heart, or those without solid background. But for those who have the background, Chadwick's book lays out, in prose so taut and spare as almost to be painful, the disintegration of East-West relations and the long process of estrangement, all of which is treated with great care and even-handedness, offering few rationalizations or comforting places to hide from the painful facts. Though the Guardian obituary for Henry's brother Owen Chadwick says of the latter that he wrote in "short sentences: no modern writer employed so few subordinate clauses.
He had a penchant for one-sentence paragraphs. His writing was always
crisp and vivid," that could equally be said of Henry in East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church, a book which seems to have been written (or at least edited) by someone with an almost sadistic desire to prune out everything but the most essential points, with no digressions or detail beyond what was judged strictly necessary. I think only a senior scholar could have pulled it off. As I tell my students, especially those fresh out of highschool, it is much harder to write a short essay or book than a long one, and they rarely believe me. But discipline--askesis--if you will is necessary in writing as in life.

Henry wrote as an Anglican, so in some important ways had no dog in any Catholic-Orthodox fights and could rise above polemics in East and West. He once said of ecumenical scholarship, and the ecumenical movement, that it was a "good cause to die for," and I agree. Henry died in 2008 at the age of 87, after a long and prolific life.

His brother Owen, also a Church of England cleric, theologian, dialogue partner with Orthodoxy on behalf of the Anglican Communion, and historian, lived to be 99, and died last Friday after an equally if not more prolific life as a scholar at the top of his class. He was rightly lauded by his country. Her Majesty made him a member of the Order of Merit, which is within the sole gift of the Sovereign, limited to 24 members, and is thus unique and rare in the British honours system as being free from grubby control by government ministers. (Having said that, I've never understood why the queen sullied so rare a guild by inducting the former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, as sordid, dimwitted, and oleaginous a mediocrity as ever emerged from her senior dominion.)

I have not read many of Chadwick's books, but have scholarly friends who have and they recommend various of them, including his study of the important patristic figure John Cassian.

I can say something more about two that I have read. More than ten years ago now, when I was grappling with the East-West divide over whether in any significant sense one can say that doctrine "develops," as the West, above all in the person of Cardinal Newman, says it can (and as the East sometimes denies), I found Chadwick's book From Bossuet to Newman a very useful history and chronology, studying figures who are sometimes lost in the massive shadow that Newman casts here, as in so much else.

But it is Owen Chadwick's A History of the Popes 1830-1914 (Oxford, 2003) that I have found utterly invaluable over the years. I think he and others--including the other Cambridge historians John Pollard and Eamon Duffy--are right in seeing this period as crucial for the creation of the modern papacy, with all its centralized power, global prominence--and ecumenical difficulty. Chadwick got in first with his study and it remains a landmark work of papal history, not least for Eastern Christians trying to understand how Vatican I came about with its twin problematic definitions of papal infallibility and jurisdiction (about which I have had a thing or two to say).

For such a crucial period of nearly a century, Chadwick's taut and spare style was on display again: the book, though 614pp. long, could easily have been twice that in lesser hands. Moreover, this is not dry-as-dust prose, either. He had, here as elsewhere, a keen eye for an illuminating tale, an amusing anecdote (as the typically winsome obituarist at the Daily Telegraph recognizes), or a juicy bit of gossip that was relevant but not salacious or vicious.

That latter point seems to come out in something lighter, which I only discovered upon reading the obits: I have just ordered his Victorian Miniature, about which the publisher tells us:

Nancy Mitford once observed that some of the most bitter personal
clashes of all time have been 'between the Manor and the Vicarage'. Owen
Chadwick's Victorian Miniature paints a detailed cameo of
nineteenth-century English rural life, in the extraordinary battle of
wills between squire and parson in a Norfolk village. Both the
evangelical clergyman and the squire, proudly conscious of his Huguenot
ancestry, were passionate diarists, and their two journals open up a
fascinating double perspective on the events which exposed their clash
of personalities. The result is a narrative that is at once deeply
informative about Victorian class distinctions, rural customs and
festivities, and richly entertaining in a manner worthy of Trollope.

As a fan of Nancy Mitford, and even more of Trollope's Barchester Towers, which I thoroughly enjoyed more than twenty years ago, Chadwick's book sounds like pleasurably diverting reading now.

Friday, July 17, 2015

The news that the Vatican dicastery responsible for such matters has been ordered by the pope of Rome to publish a decree recognizing the heroic virtues of Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky is good news indeed, as the Ottawa institute bearing his name explains.

Would it be churlish to remark that such news is grossly overdue, and should never have been held up for decades in Rome in the first place? There are important ecclesiological issues here. More than a decade ago now I asked those involved with the process why the synod of the supposedly sui iuris Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) did not simply go ahead with its own process of declaring Sheptytsky a saint (of which I am not in doubt). The argument in favor of handling matters locally only gained strength under the papacy of Benedict XVI, who returned beatifications to the home church of the candidate in question, and was, moreover, on record going back decades in calling for far greater decentralization (of many issues and practices) out of Rome and back to the local and regional structures of the Church. Canonizations were once, of course, very local affairs, and only gradually centralized in Rome for reasons that make rather limited sense today.

There are, moreover, important geopolitical considerations, at least according to John Allen. I think Allen may be making more of this than meets the eye, but let that pass for now.

For those who want good studies on Sheptytsky, there are, fortunately, several in English by reputable scholars--though, alas, no good book-length biography that I know of, notwithstanding the fact his rich, long, productive life would certainly lend itself to one. Perhaps the estimable church historian and priest Athanasius McVay, author of several recent studies, and author also of this invaluable blog, can be thumb-screwed into writing one if he is not already doing so. I interviewed him here about one of his earlier books; but see here also for others.

Returning for a moment to the question of his role in the Holocaust, see this handsome and moving book recently published by the Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in Ottawa: Archbishop Andrei Sheptytsky and the Ukrainian Jewish Bond. But see even more the memoirs of one Jew whose survival he attributes to Sheptytsky: Kurt Lewin's A Journey Through Illusions. (A Ukrainian version was apparently published in 2007.) This is a haunting, moving book deserving a wide audience.

Slipyj was not killed but spent a brutal 18 years in concentration camps. He would be released in 1963 and exiled to Rome (his "gilded cage" as I was told he called it) for the remaining 21 years of his life, dying just a scant 5 years before the legalization of the UGCC and its emergence from the underground.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Though schoolchildren all over the planet don't think there's enough summer left, there is in fact plenty of time and daylight still in which to begin learning the original language of the New Testament. Many summers ago now, while a grad student, I started studying Greek under John Jillions, the Orthodox priest, scholar, and now chancellor of the OCA. He had done his doctorate at the University of Thessaloniki on the New Testament and thus was ideally skilled as a teacher. As I now tell my students, there is always value in learning another language--and ideally several--but for scholars that value is at least doubled when it comes to languages such as Latin and Greek. Along comes a new course of study from the Jesuit Francis Gignac, An Introductory New Testament Greek Course (CUA Press, 2015), 232pp.

About this book we are told:

New Testament Greek is a form of Koine Greek, the common language
that evolved in the time of Alexander the Great from a welter of
dialects of classical times. For more than ten centuries. Koine Greek
was the ev- eryday commercial and cultural language of the Mediterranean
world. It is best-known, though, for being the language in which the
New Testament was composed.

Many Christians have the
desire to read the New Testament in its original language.
Unfortunately, books that introduce the student to New Testament Greek
either tend to be long-winded, or overly simplified, or both. In this
book, legendary scholar of biblical Greek, the late Frank Gignac
provides a straight-forward "just the facts" approach to the subject. In
fifteen lessons, he presents the basics of the grammar and the
vocabulary essential for reading the Gospels in the original language.
All the reader need do is to supply the desire to learn. As Gignac
writes, "Good luck as you begin to learn another language! It may be
sheer drudgery for a while, but the thrill will come when you begin to
read the New Testament in the language in which it was written."

This
new edition features a new preface from the author, a foreword from
fellow classicist Frank Matera, and an answer guide to the problems
presented in the exercises. The book thus can be used for self- study
for those who seek to learn the language of the early church.

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) hailed Origen of Alexandria (185-254)
as a holy priest, a gifted homilist, a heroic Christian, and a
celebrated exegete and theologian of the ancient Church. In this book
Thomas Scheck presents one of the fruits of Erasmus's endeavors in the
field of patristic studies (a particularly neglected field of
scholarshipwithin Erasmus studies) by providing the first English
translation, annotated and thoroughly introduced, of Erasmus final work,
the Prefaces to his Edition of Origen's writings (1536). Originally
published posthumously two months after Erasmus's death, the work
surveys Origen of Alexandria's life, writings, preaching, and
contribution to the Catholic Church. The staggering depth and breadth of
Erasmus's learning are exhibited here, as well as the maturity of his
theological reflections, which in many ways anticipate the irenicism of
the Second Vatican Council with respect to Origen. Erasmus presents
Origen as a marvelous doctor of the ancient Church who made a tremendous
contribution to the Catholic exegetical tradition and who lived a
saintly life. Scheck's translation of Erasmus's prefaces is prefaced by
four substantial chapters of introductory material, outlining Erasmus's
program for theological renewal, a survey of Origen's life and works
from a modern perspective, a discussion of Origen's legacy in the Church
as an exegete and theologian (focusing particularly on Origen's
influence on St. Jerome), and the immediate 16th century background of
Erasmus's Edition of Origen. These chapters are followed by the
translation itself, to which is then appended a lengthy appendix chapter
that discusses Erasmus's own legacy in the Catholic Church in the 16th
century.

Friday, July 10, 2015

Whatever one thinks of the ugliness of the geopolitics and war-making of the current Russian regime, there is no detracting from the often staggering beauty of much of Russian church architecture, liturgy, and iconography. I have many lavishly illustrated coffee-table books about Russian churches and architecture, and many more about Russian iconography--to say nothing of CDs of Russian liturgies, all of which are lovely indeed.

Carpeted in boreal forests, dotted with lakes, cut by rivers, and
straddling the Arctic Circle, the region surrounding the White Sea,
which is known as the Russian North, is sparsely populated and immensely
isolated. It is also the home to architectural marvels, as many of the
original wooden and brick churches and homes in the region's ancient
villages and towns still stand. Featuring nearly two hundred full color
photographs of these beautiful centuries-old structures, Architecture at the End of the Earth
is the most recent addition to William Craft Brumfield's ongoing
project to photographically document all aspects of Russian
architecture.

The architectural masterpieces Brumfield
photographed are diverse: they range from humble chapels to grand
cathedrals, buildings that are either dilapidated or well cared for, and
structures repurposed during the Soviet era. Included are onion-domed
wooden churches such as the Church of the Dormition, built in 1674 in
Varzuga; the massive walled Transfiguration Monastery on Great
Solovetsky Island, which dates to the mid-1550s; the Ferapontov-Nativity
Monastery's frescoes, painted in 1502 by Dionisy, one of Russia's
greatest medieval painters; nineteenth-century log houses, both rustic
and ornate; and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Vologda, which was
commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in the 1560s. The text that introduces
the photographs outlines the region's significance to Russian history
and culture.

Brumfield is challenged by the immense difficulty of
accessing the Russian North, and recounts traversing sketchy roads,
crossing silt-clogged rivers on barges and ferries, improvising travel
arrangements, being delayed by severe snowstorms, and seeing the region
from the air aboard the small planes he needs to reach remote areas.

The
buildings Brumfield photographed, some of which lie in near ruin, are
at constant risk due to local indifference and vandalism, a lack of
maintenance funds, clumsy restorations, or changes in local and national
priorities. Brumfield is concerned with their futures and hopes that
the region's beautiful and vulnerable achievements of master Russian
carpenters will be preserved. Architecture at the End of the Earth
is at once an art book, a travel guide, and a personal document about
the discovery of this bleak but beautiful region of Russia that most
readers will see here for the first time.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

I drew attention to this collection edited by Lucian Leustean, Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe, when it was published last year, and it has since then sat accusingly on my desk. I've picked it up several times and started it over the last few months, but always some interruption or other took me away from it. Only this week had a chance to devote some time to it.

Let me say straightaway that anybody with any interest in the vexed question of Orthodoxy and nationalism--as well as the wider religio-political history of southeastern Europe over the last 150 years--cannot be without this book. The introductory chapter, which cogently sets forth an overview of forms and causes of nationalism and various scholarly theories and treatments of it, is itself worth the price of the book.

After that, the book devotes chapters to Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the role of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the sunset of the Ottoman Empire and its millet system. The details unearthed considerably complicate conventional portraits about ethno-phyletism, the role of the French Revolution, and much else besides. This is a deeply fascinating book that has been smoothly edited.

The region that is today Macedonia was long the heart
of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It was home to a complex mix of peoples
and faiths who had for hundreds of years lived together in relative
peace. To be sure, these people were no strangers to coercive violence
and various forms of depredations visited upon them by bandits and state
agents. In the final decades of the nineteenth century and throughout
the twentieth century, however, the region was periodically racked by
bitter conflict that was qualitatively different from previous outbreaks
of violence. In Blood Ties, Ipek K. Yosmaoglu explains the
origins of this shift from sporadic to systemic and pervasive violence
through a social history of the "Macedonian Question."

Yosmaoglu's
account begins in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin (1878), when a
potent combination of zero-sum imperialism, nascent nationalism, and
modernizing states set in motion the events that directly contributed to
the outbreak of World War I and had consequences that reverberate to
this day. Focusing on the experience of the inhabitants of Ottoman
Macedonia during this period, she shows how communal solidarities broke
down, time and space were rationalized, and the immutable form of the
nation and national identity replaced polyglot, fluid associations that
had formerly defined people’s sense of collective belonging. The region
was remapped; populations were counted and relocated. An escalation in
symbolic and physical violence followed, and it was through this process
that nationalism became an ideology of mass mobilization among the
common folk. Yosmaoglu argues that national differentiation was a
consequence, and not the cause, of violent conflict in Ottoman
Macedonia.

Friday, July 3, 2015

A colleague of mine, a medieval historian, recently started teaching a course called "The Dark Ages: Were They All That Dark?" More recent scholarship continues to suggest that we have been too quick not only to label that period "dark" but, more generally, to police past periods in light of present politics in service of today's agendas. A recent book continues in the process of re-evaluating the past rather than blithely assuming it was all darkness and chaos: A.D. Lee, From Rome to Byzantium AD 363 to 565: The Transformation of Ancient Rome (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 360pp.

About this book we are told:

Between the deaths of the Emperors Julian (363) and Justinian (565), the
Roman Empire underwent momentous changes. Most obviously, control of
the west was lost to barbarian groups during the fifth century, and
although parts were recovered by Justinian, the empire's centre of
gravity shifted irrevocably to the east, with its focal point now the
city of Constantinople. Equally important was the increasing dominance
of Christianity not only in religious life, but also in politics,
society and culture. Doug Lee charts these and other significant
developments which contributed to the transformation of ancient Rome and
its empire into Byzantium and the early medieval west. By emphasising
the resilience of the east during late antiquity and the continuing
vitality of urban life and the economy, this volume offers an
alternative perspective to the traditional paradigm of decline and fall.

Last year I interviewed Nicholas Denysenko about his splendid recent book Chrismation: A Primer for Catholics.
This year it was announced in late June that Nick's book had won second place in the Liturgy category of the annual book awards of the Catholic Press Association. Axios!

Also earlier this year I used the book with my grad students in a class on sacraments, and they found it a challenging, compelling, and cogent study which they all enjoyed and from which they found themselves greatly edified.

So for all these reasons: if you haven't ordered it yet, go ahead and do so!

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

I've drawn attention earlier to this welcome series that Ashgate is putting out. It is by no means inexpensive, but certainly every serious institutional library devoted to Eastern Christianity will spare no monies in attaining this complete collection, which continues to appear volume by volume roughly every 12-18 months. The latest installment is edited by a young scholar whom I have interviewed on here before about his other works: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, ed., Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek (The Worlds of Eastern Christianity, 300-1500) (Ashgate, 2014), 579pp.

About this collection we are told:

This volume brings together a set of fundamental contributions, many
translated into English for this publication, along with an important
introduction. Together these explore the role of Greek among Christian
communities in the late antique and Byzantine East (late Roman Oriens),
specifically in the areas outside of the immediate sway of
Constantinople and imperial Asia Minor. The local identities based
around indigenous eastern Christian languages (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian,
Georgian, etc.) and post-Chalcedonian doctrinal confessions
(Miaphysite, Church of the East, Melkite, Maronite) were solidifying
precisely as the Byzantine polity in the East was extinguished by the
Arab conquests of the seventh century. In this multilayered cultural
environment, Greek was a common social touchstone for all of these
Christian communities, not only because of the shared Greek heritage of
the early Church, but also because of the continued value of Greek
theological, hagiographical, and liturgical writings. However, these
interactions were dynamic and living, so that the Greek of the medieval
Near East was itself transformed by such engagement with eastern
Christian literature, appropriating new ideas and new texts into the
Byzantine repertoire in the process.

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About Me

I am the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies; author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy; a tenured associate professor and chairman of the Dept. of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and a subdeacon of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) resident in the Eparchy of St. Nicholas of Chicago.